Our picks: five traveler's tales

Traveling is all well and good if you have the money, time and energy. But sometimes all you have is your armchair.

Even when you do travel, you're probably not going to cross Australia on foot with three camels. Or catch bus rides from oasis to oasis through the Sahara Desert. Or search Borneo for an albino rhinoceros. Fortunately, many adventurous writers take to the road, often at risk of their life, limb or dignity, to deliver the globe's most unearthly places directly to our Barcaloungers. "The imagination,"...